


Spy Vs. Spy

by lilacwood



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel, Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Peggy Carter, Gen, Ignoring MCU timeline for Natasha because it is a literal shambles, Otherwise MCU-compliant, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, SHIELD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-24
Updated: 2018-09-24
Packaged: 2019-07-16 08:44:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16082570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacwood/pseuds/lilacwood
Summary: While the newly-defected Natalia Romanova waits for SHIELD to decide what to do with her, she gets an unexpected visit.





	Spy Vs. Spy

_Somewhere near Budapest, 1991_

Natalia Romanova sat in her little holding cell and waited.

She was somewhere in the belly of a SHIELD facility, an off-the-grid prison that she wasn't sure she ever expected to leave. She had signed up for this. Ran out of options and let Barton's puppy eyes and promises get the better of her. Maybe she even thought she deserved whatever they were going to do to her here, in this place that didn't exist. Her hands were dripping with blood. The world would not miss her.

The last two weeks had been a boring parade of identical black-suited agents who never spoke, only came to deliver food and water at regular intervals. They were trying to let the isolation break her, she was sure of it – but this was a cakewalk compared to the Red Room.

Natalia was patient. They would get to torture eventually. They always did.

She wondered if the Director – Fury – would get his hands dirty or just watch. Her money was on getting his hands dirty; he struck her as someone whose hands were also irrevocably stained red. They had that in common, at least.

She had hoped (foolishly) that Barton might be permitted access to come see her, if only to be the first person to speak to her in weeks, but she knew better than to expect him. If she had been running this operation, she wouldn't have let Barton anywhere near her. He was dangerously close to compromised as it was.

Natalia spent her time imagining a thousand things that could have happened to break up the monotony; the complex exploding, a Red Room agent managing to infiltrate and slip her a cyanide capsule, Barton going rogue and slaughtering his way down to her, one of the agents making a mistake and getting close enough for her to grab his gun.

What actually happened, though, was something that had not occurred to her as a plausible scenario; at the two-and-a-half week mark, an agent appeared with a chair, placed it directly in front of her cell, and left. 

Natalia sat and looked at the chair for at least three hours before the door opened again. She was expecting another agent. What she got instead was a seventy-year-old woman in a sharp maroon pantsuit, with neatly curled iron-grey hair and piercing eyes.

“ _Babushka_ ,” Natalia drawled without bothering to get off the narrow bunk, folding her arms behind her head. “Are you the good cop? Supposed to make me feel comfortable?”

The woman gave a bark of laughter at that. “If so, I'm afraid they've sent the wrong person,” she said in a crisp English accent. 

“Bad cop, then,” Natalia amended, surveying her through hooded eyes. She schooled her face into a mask of boredom – the older woman's eyes were a little too sharp for her taste.

“I leave that sort of thing to someone else these days,” the woman said, folding her hands in her lap. 

She was wearing a wedding ring, a simple gold band with no diamond. There were old scars across her knuckles and the backs of her hands, the kind of scars Natalia knew only came from fist fights. And Natalia had been in this business long enough to know that agents didn't usually make it to seventy. “You're too important to be down here,” she said idly, risking a guess. “Shouldn't you be calling the shots from an office somewhere?”

“I hate offices,” was the woman's level reply. There was a small smile hovering around the corners of her mouth that made Natalia want to return it kind – a challenge of sorts.

Natalia shrugged, but curiosity had gotten hold of her now, fizzing under her skin. She got up fluidly and moved to the barrier of thick bulletproof glass at the front of her cell. At closer range, the woman's features had a stubborn set to them – straight, serious brows, deep lines around her mouth that could have been laugh lines or frown lines or both, and those bright brown eyes that made her look like she had a very amusing secret. No insignias on her lapels or shoulders to give any indication of rank. Her clothing and jewellery were simple and unremarkable – probably from a department store, except the wedding band. No clues there. She had chosen well. “Who are you?” Natalia asked.

The woman tilted her head to one side. “Giving up already?”

Natalia shrugged. “I've had a long few weeks. And I really want to get out of this cell at some point.”

A smile flickered over the woman's face. “As it so happens, I also want you to get out of this cell at some point.”

“Well, just let me know when you're ready,” Natalia said, straight-faced. “I just have to pack my things, give the place a good once-over, tell someone to feed the cat. You know how it is.”

“Tell me,” the woman said, smiling that little smile at her, “is the sarcasm part of the training or is it a byproduct?”

“What training?” Natalia asked, forcing herself to stay where she was, keep her posture loose and languid even as her blood turned cold. She had been sure, so sure that she was out of their reach here, that SHIELD would protect her even if it meant keeping her in a box on a black site for the rest of her days – she blinked and the woman's face had changed, the jawline softened, the hair gone an icy bottle blonde. _Sloppy_ , her old headmistress whispered in her memory even as the man behind her barred her windpipe shut and she struggled to breathe – and then she blinked again and the world had locked back into place.

The woman was watching her carefully. “I met someone like you once,” she said. “A long time ago.”

“I doubt it.”

“She had scars,” the woman said, fingers of her left hand moving to encircle her right wrist, “here. From handcuffs, you see. She slept in them every night.”

There was a vague rushing sound in Natalia's ears.

“You don't have them, of course – they realized it was a tell, changed to padded restraints. But she was like you, in some ways,” the woman said, and the weight of her gaze suddenly felt impossibly heavy. “Clever, resourceful, determined. And lonely.”

Natalia opened her mouth to lie and then reconsidered. They already knew what she was. “We're meant to be lonely,” she said instead. “Attachments are a weakness.”

The woman smiled again. “And yet, here you are. Clint Barton is very eager to see you, you know,” she said, and Natalia almost jumped at the abrupt subject change. “He's making quite a nuisance of himself.”

“I'm sure he is,” Natalia said dryly. “But you didn't come all the way down here to tell me that.”

“No,” the woman agreed. 

“What did you come down here for?”

The woman looked at her for a long moment, calculating, before she said, “I was her friend, I think. The girl with the scars. Or - I don't think she really knew how to have a friend. But I tried to help her. And I'd like to try to help you, if you'll let me.”

Something hot and foreign rose in Natalia then, an emotion she couldn't name that made her want to hide in a corner and slowly peel her own skin off. “Why?” she snapped.

“Because I think you could be very useful to us,” the woman said, standing slowly, and some of the tension ebbed out of Natalia as the woman finally put a price on her kindness. This, at least, she understood. “And – I think you might be surprised to find us equally useful in turn.”

Now that she was standing, Natalia was surprised to note that the older woman was nearly six inches taller than she was. She stayed where she was, leaning against the glass. “Great,” she said blandly. “Where do I sign?”

The tiny, polite smile that the woman levelled at her was a work of art – straight down the nose, not quite reaching the eyes, mouth curling the exact right amount to be unobjectionable at first glance and slightly intimidating at the second. Natalia made a mental note to attempt to recreate it later. “I'll give you a few days to think it over,” the woman said, and started moving at a sedate pace for the door.

Natalia waited until she was almost there before she said, “What happened to her? The girl you knew?”

The woman shot a surprised glance over her shoulder, pausing with one hand on the door handle. “She joined a ballet troupe,” she said, eyes sparkling. 

The irony was not lost on Natalia. She just wasn't sure if she thought it was funny. The woman opened the door and had half stepped through it when Natalia called out, “See you in a few days – Agent Carter.”

From the other side of the door, Peggy Carter gave her a real smile, wide with approval, and then shut the door and locked it with a heavy clank.

Allowing herself a victorious grin, Natalia settled back onto the bunk. A few days wasn't long at all. Probably just about the amount of time she needed to perfect Peggy Carter's polite and chilling smile.

**Author's Note:**

> The KGB dissolved in 1991, so if Natasha traded the KGB for HYDRA (as she mentions in CA:WS), she would have had to do this by 1991. Of course MCU canon would make her seven years old at the time...sounds like we need a Black Widow movie to get this cleared up. :)


End file.
